A movie player for Linux (and other Unix operating systems) written by Arpad Gereoffy.

Mplayer is a versatile movie player which supports a wide range of video file formats, and tries to ensure good audio/video sync during playback. It's especially good at handling broken files (e.g. AVI files that don't even work with Windows Media Player), and plays AVI files without index chunk (albeit without the ability to seek)
Mplayer does not have a GUI, although one is currently in the works.
Since the latest versions, it's also able to play fullscreen with correct aspect ratio in high resolutions (useful if you have a graphics card with hardware scaling)

According to the README, the latest version supports the following:

Supported input formats:

  • VCD (Video CD) directly from CD-ROM or from CDRwin's .bin image file
  • MPEG 1/2 System Stream (PS/VOB) and Elementary Stream (ES) file formats
  • RIFF AVI file format
  • ASF 1.0 file format
Supported audio codecs:

  • PCM (uncompressed) audio (8/16 bit, mono/stereo)
  • MPEG layer 2/3 audio (using mp3lib, based on mpg123 www.mpg123.de)
  • AC3 audio (using ac3dec/libac3)
  • Win32 ACM audio codecs (the *.ACM files) (Only in the AVI player) tested with: DivX audio, MS-ADPCM
  • aLaw audio (using code from xanim)
  • MS-GSM audio (using modified xa_gsm.c from avifile)
Supported video codecs:

  • MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 video decoder (using mpeg2dec/libmpeg2, supports 3DNow! and MMX)
  • Win32 ICM (VfW) video codecs (for example DivX using DIVXC32.DLL)
  • OpenDivX encode & decode (see ProjectMayo)
Supported video output devices:

  • mga: Matrox G200/G400 hardware YUV overlay via the mga_vid device
  • xmga: Matrox G200/G400 overlay (mga_vid) in X11 window (Xv emulation on X 3.3.x !)
  • x11: X11 optionally with SHM extension
  • dga: X11 DGA extension (only in 24/32bpp)
  • fsdga:X11 DGA extension with fullscreen scaling (only 24/32bpp and MPEG!)
  • xv: X11 using overlays with the Xvideo extension (hardware YUV & scaling)
  • gl: OpenGL renderer, works only with Utah-GLX! (no DRI or nVidia drivers)
  • syncfb: Matrox G400 YUV support on framebuffer (not tested, maybe broken)
  • fbdev:Output to general framebuffers (only MPEG1/2 and OpenDivX)
  • 3dfx: Voodoo2/3 hardware YUV (/dev/3dfx) support (not yet tested, maybe broken)
  • sdl: SDL >= v1.1.7 driver (slower than 'x11', but supports software scaling) (NOT supported by us! Don't submit SDL bugreports!)
  • null: Null output (for speed tests/benchmarking)
  • pgm: PGM file output (for testing purposes)
  • md5: MD5sum output (for mpeg conformance tests)
Supported audio output devices:

  • OSS driver
  • ALSA driver with OSS emulation
  • ESD with the esddsp utility
In my very humble opinion, mplayer currently is the best movie player available for Linux.

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